A marketing consultant has an interesting window into the cultures of the institutions with which he works. If you are going to be successful at this game, you need to spend a lot of time learning about your clients – their priorities, passions, ways of operating, hang-ups – everything that would impact the success or failure of a campaign. It doesn’t make any difference if you come up with the greatest idea in the universe for marketing an institution, if the institution itself cannot buy into the vision and advance it on its own. You have to calibrate your solutions to what will fit the client. You have to build the trust so that a client will take risks that he wouldn’t normally take.

This is all part and parcel of being a marketing consultant. In my neck of the woods – educational institutions – issues of trust-building and identifying with the prevailing culture are particularly acute, although I suspect that people who work in other sectors feel the same way.

What you are ultimately looking for is a good partner. As a consultant, you are always limited in what you can do for an institution on your own. Because I possess in-house creative capacity, I can produce magazines, viewbooks, logos, and identity systems. I team with partners to produce websites, bill boards and radio and TV spots. These are helpful services, no question. But they are not the guts of marketing.

Everybody knows the obvious things that separate a good client from a bad one – a good client understands the nature of internal versus external roles and how to get the best out of a consulting team. He is a candid and upfront representative of his institutional culture and at the same time will go to bat for you to preserve the integrity of marketing work. He is at once an advocate for you and the institution.

The thing that separates a great client from a good client is more complicated. Ultimately great marketing is about change. When marketing digs deep and connects with the culture and long-term goals of an institution, it has the power to be transformative.

Clients work in bureaucratic cultures. They do so out of necessity. I am not one to view bureaucracy, as many do, as inherently negative. Bureaucracy is by far the most efficient means for accomplishing administrative tasks within an organization by providing regularity, consistency, clearly defined roles, a professionalized staff, and clear avenues for professional advancement. God help those organizations that do not have a properly functioning bureaucracy.

The danger of bureaucracies is that people within them often lose sight of the ultimate goal for which they work and instead view the perpetuation of the bureaucracy itself or their function within the bureaucracy as their purpose. Bureaucracies lead to insularity. And they resist change.

The reason creative marketing people do not work within bureaucracies is because bureaucratic insularity is antithetical to the kind of free thinking required to move an institution forward via marketing. Great marketing has the power to break through bureaucratic inertia and change the character of an institution. But it can only be done by an outsider who is not overly infected by the insularity of the internal culture. What is a great client? A great client:

• is committed to genuine institutional change – doesn’t commission marketing consultants to reinforce bureaucratic insularity, but to break through it
• appreciates the way in which true marketing work can change the fiber of an institution and set it on a different organizational path
• is looking for a teammate on the outside to effect such change.

If you know someone who fits that description, let me know.